More stories

  • in

    Janelle James Reacts to Her Second Emmy Nomination for ‘Abbott Elementary’

    To many television viewers, Janelle James has become synonymous with Ava Coleman, her bumbling but brashly confident elementary school principal in the hit ABC workplace comedy “Abbott Elementary.”The real-life James, a veteran comedian who for years slugged it out on stand-up stages around the country, isn’t so bumbling. But on Wednesday she had cause to be just as confident, after receiving her second Emmy nomination for playing Ava, her breakout role. She is familiar now with the choreography of the awards show: the campaigning, the events, the dressing up … the media interviews. “After the last Emmys, you kind of start getting ready for the next Emmys,” she said, joking. “But it’s still a huge deal.”Having recently woken up to several calls informing her of the nomination — once again for best supporting actress in a comedy — James discussed by phone the sitcom’s success, expanding her comedic persona and the personal growth of the delightfully self-aggrandizing comedic foil that is Ava. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.I’m going to ask you the question that I’m supposed to ask as a journalist: How did it feel to hear you were nominated? But if it’s not too early for some improv, would you mind answering as Ava, not as Janelle?This is expected. You know when I started the show at the school, I knew in my heart that this would be the outcome. Sure, it’s for the children, but I’m the glue that holds it all together. So for people to focus on me, you know, it’s all the better because then I can shift the focus, down the line, to the kids who really … deserve it.Thank you for humoring me. So — back as Janelle — tell me about your experience at last year’s Emmys.That was a wild experience for me. I had never been to the Emmys before and really did not understand what the whole process was. It was a totally new experience, and my best friend, Hadiyah Robinson, who I started in this business with, was next to me and we were truly just geeking out about seeing all of these famous people.Do you ever find yourself channeling Ava into your own life?Before this role, I remember being younger and more fabulous, pre-comedy, pre-standup and really making a conscious decision to downgrade in looks and fabulousness in order to maintain my sanity in a male-driven industry. I was doing the whole “comedian in a black T-shirt and jeans” thing. This role — the whole getting gussied up — has reminded me that I do like those things, and that is a part of me. I’m trying to bring that back.This show went quickly from being the new comedy on the block to being well entrenched in pop culture. How did that happen so fast?That’s great — that means we’re already part of the zeitgeist and the lexicon. People feel like they know us, and I feel like that’s the sign of a true sitcom: something that you watch with your family and something that feels like it’s been part of your life the whole time.What are your hopes for Ava in future seasons?Maybe more Ava outside of the school, what she does when she’s not working. We set up the fact that she’s interested in learning and maybe teaching down the line. I hope we continue down that path — Ava’s education reawakening. And more of the same. More high jinks, more lines, more laughter. More

  • in

    Tony Gilroy Kept the Faith for ‘Andor.’ Its 8 Emmy Nods Are Affirmation.

    Wednesday was a big day for the Galactic Empire. “Andor,” the Disney+ “Star Wars” prequel series that made its debut last fall, picked up eight Emmy nominations, including one in the best drama category.Over 12 episodes in its first season, the show follows Cassian Andor, the Rebel spy played by Diego Luna, who will eventually carry out the desperate act of espionage depicted in the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” “Andor” has drawn acclaim for its focus on the interior lives of its characters and for homing in on the struggles of ordinary citizens. A second season of the show is forthcoming.The Emmy accolades offer a degree of vindication for the “Star Wars” executives at Disney who made a big and expensive bet on the series, and for the creator of “Andor,” Tony Gilroy, who helped write and oversee “Rogue One.”In an interview on Wednesday, Gilroy discussed the Emmy nods and how “Star Wars” has expanded on TV. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We know that delving into the “Star Wars” universe comes with pressure. So how does it feel to rack up eight Emmy nominations today?Affirming. The past 10 months have just been such a pleasure. It’s such a huge show, but we made it so privately and quietly. When you make a “Star Wars” show or film, you can’t go out and do a lot of focus groups and a lot of testing. We really never had an audience, and the pressure to finish the show comes right down to the deadline. So really, the audience was our focus group. We really did not know what to expect as we came forward. And to end up here now with eight nominations, it’s just a gas.It’s also the payout on a really huge gamble that Disney took and that Lucasfilm took. This is not for the faint of heart, shows of this scale. And so good on them. I hope they’re happy with this result as well.“Obi-Wan Kenobi” also did well today. And “The Mandalorian” has been a success. What, if anything, does this tell you about transferring “Star Wars” stories from the big screen to TV?It’s economically challenging and its certainly emotionally and chronologically challenging to the creative team. But if you have a story that wants a larger canvas, that opportunity is now available. And there are a lot of stories that don’t want to fit into 120 pages or an hour and a half. It’s a very exciting time to be a storyteller if you can crack the formula of how to make it economically feasible.Some of the praise the show has drawn is for sort of giving us a look at ordinary people in an oppressive world. There is maybe a little less classic “Star Wars” and a little more focus on day-to-day life on distant planets. Was that intentional? Why go that direction?Those are the things that have always interested me. When Disney and Kathy Kennedy [the Lucasfilm president] came and proposed it, it was with that as a sort of genetic mandate for: Let’s go into the kitchen and get out of the dining room; let’s go to the back of the house. There are billions and billions of people that live in the galaxy. Why concentrate on the royal family and a dominant story that’s taken up all the oxygen so far? Why not see if we can’t take a deep dive into what it’s like to be at the ground level as a revolution is sweeping through?Did you have faith that “Star Wars” fans would be interested in that?I’ve been on this — in August it’ll be four years. My ability to believe and have confidence is not a constant. There have been times all the way through where I wondered if I’d made a terrible mess of my life or made the wrong commitment. It’s not like a film where you can sort of bandage yourself up and get through the experience if it’s not going well. This is a long-term commitment and the responsibility is enormous on every level.So I wish I could say that I had faith all the way through, but that would not be true. More

  • in

    How Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon Straightened Out ‘Full Circle’

    Their gripping new crime thriller for Max is loaded with twists and layers. But it is actually much simpler than what they originally conceived.The first time the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter Ed Solomon worked together was on the murder mystery “Mosaic” (2017), which could be watched as a choose-your-own-adventure-style story using a smartphone app or as a six-episode HBO mini-series.“Mosaic” drew mixed reviews, but the two men learned a lot doing it. For their next collaboration — what eventually became the six-part series “Full Circle,” debuting Thursday on Max — they envisioned another show that would have two distinct, separately shot versions: one told in classic, linear fashion and another that would present the same events told from different perspectives and whose meaning changes depending on which path the viewer chooses.The idea was greenlighted in 2021, and Solomon started writing two versions that would tell the same story differently. Then last spring, reality hit.“When I got the schedule and I saw the number of days and the page count of just the linear, I was like, ‘This is physically impossible,’” Soderbergh said in a recent joint interview with Solomon. He added: “I had visions of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ — that this was going to become a legendary folly.”Soderbergh decided to jettison the branching version. But then he had to tell Solomon, who had already written 175 pages of it in addition to the six linear episodes.“That was not a lunch that I was looking forward to,” Soderbergh said. It turned out, though, that Solomon already agreed with him. “It was just too much,” he said.There are few better ways to spend an afternoon than talking about film and television with these two men, who love making and watching stories. Soderberg’s résumé careens among blockbusters (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Magic Mike”), daring oddities (“The Girlfriend Experience”) and the odd Liberace biopic (“Behind the Candelabra”). Solomon’s often has comic undertones, with films including “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Men in Black.”Together, their efforts have had a decidedly noirish bent — sandwiched between their two series is the 1950s crime feature “No Sudden Move” (2021), for HBO Max. The premise of “Full Circle” follows suit, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s suspenseful 1963 film “High and Low”: What if there were a kidnapping but the wrong child was taken?Even without branching, the story delivers plenty of twists and layers, toggling between two families in an unlikely entanglement: One is the Manhattan family of a celebrity chef played by Dennis Quaid (with Claire Danes as his shot-calling daughter and Timothy Olyphant as his son-in-law with a mysterious past); the other, led by a criminal matriarch (CCH Pounder), is rooted in a Guyanese community in Queens. In the middle stands a rogue Postal Service inspector played by Zazie Beetz (“Atlanta”).Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes, right (with Lisa Janae), play a wealthy Manhattan couple who become entangled in a botched kidnapping of their son.Sarah Shatz/MaxCCH Pounder (with Phaldut Sharma) plays a crime boss based in Queens; she has mysterious historical links to the wealthy Manhattan family. Sarah Shatz/MaxSoderbergh and Solomon’s methods and history of close collaboration helped them turn on a dime and adapt the show as they went along.“Scenes were being rewritten, lines were being thrown in while we were doing it,” Phaldut Sharma, a Britain-based actor who plays Pounder’s right-hand man, said in a recent video call. “It was my first my first experience of doing a job in America and I thought this must be the norm, but members of the crew told me this is not really the way it normally goes.”Soderbergh, 60, and Solomon, 62, sat down for a lengthy chat at Soderbergh’s office, in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Steven works famously fast, editing himself at the end of every day on a shoot. How does the writer factor in?ED SOLOMON Most weekends we would meet, usually on a Sunday. I would get a text: “Are you around?” Which meant “I’m going to be in the office for the afternoon.” [Laughs.] And we would just talk through: “Where’s this going? And what does that mean for what we’ve got?” We were constantly reassessing — the writing continues as the shooting starts, and it continues as the editing is happening. I really appreciate how fluid you are with that.STEVEN SODERBERGH It has to swing both ways. I can’t say to Ed, “Rethink this,” or, “Rejigger that,” without looking at my own work and going, “I’m throwing out stuff that I worked hard on trying to figure out and shooting.”SOLOMON Sometimes the show outgrows your original idea, which is part of what’s exciting.“Full Circle” relies more on detail than on back stories — Quaid’s character, Chef Jeff, has a ponytail that speaks volumes about his personality. Was there a deliberate effort to be lean?SODERBERGH There can be a tendency to spoon-feed the viewer about the back story of the characters before you’ve even really gotten into the story. That’s something that I resist as a viewer, and it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker. Most things that I see, both movies and television, are too long. My motto is, if it can be pulled out and it still works, it should be pulled out. I want this thing to be all marrow as much as possible.Dennis Quaid plays a celebrity chef whose empire has some unsavory ties.Sarah Shatz/MaxThe loose, sometimes shaggy atmosphere recalls the noir movies of the 1970s. Were they part of your influences?SODERBERGH I’m after a sort of discovered precision. I want the construction of something that’s been considered, but I want it to feel like it’s happening right in front of me for the first time. I was looking at “The French Connection,” the Sidney Lumet cop films from the ’70s, because I did want that kind of feeling.What draws you to noir?SODERBERGH It’s just a very cinematic form of storytelling. The conflicts are clear, they’re interesting. They inevitably lead to some burst of violence, either physical or emotional, because the pressure builds up in the clash between people’s dreams and desires, and reality, and shifting loyalties, mistrust, all of these things. It’s a very sexy genre to work in as a director.SOLOMON When people are hiding their truth from others, and then the circumstances pressurize them and they’re trying harder and harder to keep that from coming out — to me that’s an exciting place to write from.SODERBERGH Genre is just a great and efficient delivery system for ideas. It’s built to have a sort of superficial narrative layer and then this subterranean thematic space that you can put anything you’re interested in, and that’s what makes it fun.Zack Ryan’s score is interestingly jarring. Why did you set a gritty thriller to such lush music?SOLOMON We talked about Douglas Sirk at the very beginning.SODERBERGH I like the juxtaposition of that visual aesthetic and the sonic aesthetic of a ’50s melodrama. I didn’t want a hip, trendy score — I wanted something very classical and emotional. Which is not typical for me, to be this in your face or in your ears with the music, trying to enhance the emotional state of the character you’re watching.SOLOMON I never told you this: I had a theory that the score was doing the work that the original branching narrative was going to do, which was all about inner life and people’s emotional experience, while this other crime story was going on.It’s always a risk when form and content don’t gel.SODERBERGH I’ve seen extremely skilled filmmakers whose style is so developed and so detailed, you can feel the intelligence and the work. It exposes the fact that the script they’ve shot isn’t as good at its job as they are at their job. Your talent has to match your ambition — you need both, but if they’re out of whack, it’s not going to happen for you. I’ve seen talented people who are not ambitious enough. We see many more people who are more ambitious than they are talented. The universe eventually tends to catch up with them.Too much back story is “something that I resist as a viewer,” said Soderbergh (right, with Solomon, middle, and Olyphant). “And it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker.” Sarah ShatzDo you feel the writers’ strike is making people think harder about how movies and TV are made? Are you reflecting on the way you create?SODERBERGH It’s something I think about a lot. My entire career has been a test of my ability to improve and optimize my work process, which is about getting to the best version of something as quickly as possible with the least amount of drama and ego. I don’t feel that the work we’re doing is necessarily important with a capital I, but it’s also not meaningless. I want to be in that space of taking it as seriously as it needs to be taken to be good. Because if you take it too seriously, it tips over into indulgence, and that’s not what I want.SOLOMON I think art made by human beings has a feel that cannot be replicated. The problem is, the people making decisions on the highest level that are all about bottom line and “How can I get rid of as many human beings as possible?” don’t have the ability to judge what is good art and not good art. My fear is, if we don’t draw a line in the sand now, we’re going to continue to a place where a lot of people are out of work.What keeps you on your toes?SODERBERGH I need a pocket of fear to keep me alert.Where was that pocket on “Full Circle”?SODERBERGH The complexity of the story, of the schedule. You need that sense that this could go sideways if I don’t execute at the best of my ability. You’ve got to find this balance of being self-critical without being paralyzed. You have to make decisions but you’ve also got to be willing to say to yourself: “That can be better. It has to be better.”SOLOMON I want to be a better writer on the other end of it. I want to know that I will have learned a lot about myself, about this project. I will push myself to a degree that when I come out the other end of it, I’m moving forward, I’ve learned stuff. More

  • in

    Ellen Hovde, ‘Grey Gardens’ Documentarian, Dies at 97

    She worked with the Maysles brothers on the groundbreaking film about two Long Island recluses, and she later shared an Emmy for a mini-series about Ben Franklin.Ellen Hovde, a documentarian who was one of the directors of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 movie that examined the lives of two reclusive women living in a deteriorating mansion on Long Island and inspired both a Broadway musical and an HBO film, died on Feb. 16 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 97.Her death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed last week by her children, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) worked on several films with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, in the late 1960s and ’70s, when they were expanding the documentary form with cinéma vérité techniques, eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of recording life and events as they happened.In 1969 she was a contributing editor on “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they peddled $49.95 Bibles door to door in New England and Florida. The next year she was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, including the concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 at which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.In 1974 she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, on “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental art project the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.The mother and daughter known as Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in a scene from the documentary “Grey Gardens,” directed by Alfred and David Maysles, Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer.Criterion CollectionThe next year came “Grey Gardens.” That film, which garnered considerable attention at the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally significant movies, took a close-up, often uncomfortable look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had dropped out of high society and were living in East Hampton, N.Y., in a crumbling mansion along with assorted cats and raccoons.The film came about somewhat by accident when Lee Radziwill, Ms. Onassis’ sister, suggested that the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the people she suggested they talk to were the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were known. The documentary Ms. Radziwill had suggested fell through, but the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde were intrigued by the Beales and proposed a film to them.“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde said in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did.”Soon Muffie Meyer, who would partner with Ms. Hovde on numerous films in the ensuing years, joined the project. Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer received directing credits on the film along with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also its editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.“The person who is doing the editing is doing something very like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she told Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, forming and structuring the material, and making the decisions about what is really going to be there on the screen — what the ideas are, what the order of events will be, where the emphasis will be.”For “Grey Gardens,” that involved going through dozens of hours of film and shaping a portrait that revealed the codependent relationship between the two eccentric women. Ms. Meyer said that, if portable cameras and tape recorders made the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens” possible, the other crucial element was the editing.“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (usually upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, was dumped in the editing room,” she said by email. “The editor’s job was to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen was a master at all of this, and there are not many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”The team behind “Grey Gardens,” clockwise from top left: David Maysles, Ms. Hovde, Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Ms. Meyer. Ms. Hovde, Ms. Froemke and Ms. Meyer were the film’s editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.Marianne Barcellona“Grey Gardens” drew both acclaim and disapproval from critics. The film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, while acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” involved in making the film, said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”The debate over whether “Grey Gardens” and other films in the same style exploit their subjects or invade their privacy has been an ongoing one, and there was a chorus of such complaints when the movie was released. But Ms. Hovde, in the Film Quarterly interview, said the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she said, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there has been this criticism — don’t worry. It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude, and they never wavered from that.”A musical based on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens” movie, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.In 1978 Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer formed Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary features and videos in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to re-create scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed jointly by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.Ms. Meyer said that in those types of projects, Ms. Hovde was a stickler for accuracy.“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-period films,” she said. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ ‘Was this bird tweet that was added to the soundtrack really a bird that could be found in Virginia in the 18th century?’”Richard Easton was one of two actors who played the title role in “Benjamin Franklin,” an Emmy-winning PBS mini-series directed by Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer that used actors to re-create historical scenes.PBS, via Associated PressEllen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925, in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mother, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a degree in theater in 1947 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she studied for a time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Ms. Hovde’s son said that she and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and that as his eyesight began to fail, she would sometimes read books into a tape recorder for him.Ms. Hovde had hoped for a career as a stage director, but, after not finding work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. By the early 1950s she was learning editing. Her credits before she began working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for the New York public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969.Ms. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. In addition to her children, she is survived by two grandchildren.Ms. Meyer said Ms. Hovde’s homes were gathering places for documentarians in the 1970s, and she once helped organize a filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.“Most of us still use it,” she said. More

  • in

    Kristen Kish Chosen as Next ‘Top Chef’ Host

    Kish, who will bring considerable TV experience to the role, succeeds Padma Lakshmi, who hosted the show for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kristen Kish, an acclaimed chef who won the 10th season of “Top Chef” more than a decade ago, will return as the next host of the long-running culinary competition, Bravo announced on Tuesday. She will succeed Padma Lakshmi, who said last month she would be departing the show, which she had hosted for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kish, who has hosted several other food-related series, will take the reins for Season 21, which the network has said will take place in Wisconsin. She will join the food writer Gail Simmons and the chef Tom Colicchio at the judges table.“‘Top Chef’ is where I started my journey — first as a competing chef, then a guest judge and now as host, I have the honor of helping to continue to build this brand,” Kish said in a statement. “It feels like coming home.”Kish, who was adopted from South Korea and grew up in Kentwood, Mich., attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. She then spent a decade working at restaurants in Boston, rising through the ranks to become the chef de cuisine at Barbara Lynch’s crown jewel restaurant, Menton.As The New York Times reported in 2014, Lynch had encouraged Kish and another young chef from her restaurant group to compete on “Top Chef.”Kish won Season 10, and has become a familiar face on the show in recent years as a guest judge. She has also opened her first restaurant, released a cookbook and has hosted or starred in several shows including “36 Hours,” a Travel Channel show that is a collaboration with The Times; “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend,” and “Restaurants at the End of the World.”Ryan Flynn, an NBCUniversal senior vice president, said in a statement that Kish was “the perfect host for the next chapter of ‘Top Chef’ as we take on a new region of the country we haven’t explored.”Both Colicchio and Simmons published posts on Instagram Tuesday afternoon applauding the choice of Kish.“She is an excellent chef, brings a world class perspective and most importantly, having been a past contestant and judge, she knows what it takes to win @bravotopchef,” Colicchio wrote.“Psyched beyond words to have her pull up that seat at Judges’ Table,” Simmons said.In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Kish added that she was already “overwhelmed by the amazing outpouring of support by the fans of ‘Top Chef’ embracing this new chapter.”“I am eager to get started!” she said.Maya Salam contributed reporting. More

  • in

    The SAG-AFTRA Union Could Strike in Hollywood This Week

    The News: Actors could join writers on the picket lines.The actors may soon be joining Hollywood screenwriters on the picket lines if their union, SAG-AFTRA, and the major studios fail to reach a deal by midnight on Wednesday. The two sides are haggling over the same issues that are front and center for the Writers Guild of America: higher wages, increased residual payments (a type of royalty) and significant guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence.Should the actors go on strike, it will be the first time in 63 years that both the actors and the writers are out at the same time over a contract dispute.Members of the Writers Guild of America picketing in Burbank, Calif.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhy It Matters: A second strike could shut Hollywood down completely.Hollywood is already 80 percent shut down since the writers went on strike on May 2. While some television shows and movies continued filming, the writers were surprisingly effective in shutting down shows in production. If the actors join them on the picket lines, productions will be closed completely, a reality that will have a significant effect on the local economies in Los Angeles and other filming locales like Atlanta and New York City. During the last writers’ strike 15 years ago, the Los Angeles economy lost an estimated $2.1 billion.The effects of a dual strike would also soon be coming to your television, with network shows going into reruns and a likely proliferation of reality television. Also, actors would no longer be able to promote new films, a reality that already exists to a large degree because the writers’ strike forced the late-night shows to go dark.Background: Streaming and A.I. bring change.Not since Ronald Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild have the writers and actors been on strike at the same time. Back then, the actors were fighting over residuals paid for licensing films for television. Today, the actors want to ensure higher wages and better residuals in an entertainment landscape in which studios are struggling to turn a profit after investing billions of dollars in streaming. The actors are also concerned about how their likenesses could be used with the advent of artificial intelligence.Guild members authorized the strike in early June, with 97.9 percent of members voting yes. Then on June 24, Fran Drescher, the president of SAG-AFTRA, and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of the guild, informed its membership that they “remained optimistic” about the talks. They added that the negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the trade association negotiating for the studios, had been “extremely productive.”A video prompted a group of more than 1,000 actors, including Ms. Drescher, to sign a letter that urged the union’s leadership to not settle for a lesser deal. “We are prepared to strike,” the letter said.On June 30, the union announced that it had extended its contract until Wednesday while the sides continued to talk.What’s Next: Could a deal still happen?After the parties negotiated all weekend, it remained unclear whether they were any closer to a resolution. Should they fail to make an agreement by midnight Pacific time on Wednesday, some 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members will be poised to join the 11,000 writers already on the picket line. More

  • in

    Timothy Olyphant Is Back for a New Chapter of ‘Justified’

    “I like to think there’s been some growth.”This was the actor Timothy Olyphant in New York last month, musing on the trajectory of his career from a TriBeCa sidewalk. He was referring specifically to the task of resurrecting past roles, which he first did a few years ago in the 2019 movie revival of “Deadwood.”Now comes “Justified: City Primeval,” an eight-episode limited series premiering on July 18, on FX. It features Olyphant returning to what is arguably his signature character, Raylan Givens, the Stetson-sporting deputy U.S. Marshal who anchored the Kentucky crime drama “Justified” for six seasons.The new show follows Raylan to Detroit for a fish-out-of-water adventure with a murderous baddie (Boyd Holbrook) and a sharp-elbowed but alluring lawyer, played by Aunjanue Ellis. The creators describe it as the existential evolution of a character, invented by the crime fiction grandmaster Elmore Leonard, who is starting to realize that he can’t chase killers forever and that he is running out of chances to connect with his teenage daughter.“It’s a mature, grown-up version of the show that we did,” said Michael Dinner, who created the limited series with Dave Andron. Both are former writers and executive producers on “Justified,” which ended its run on FX in 2015.The creators and Olyphant, who is also an executive producer on “City Primeval,” hope to bring back Raylan for at least one more series after this one. But first, they are going to find out if people are still interested in the character or “Justified” without the original show’s evocative backwoods setting and colorful criminals, played by the likes of Walton Goggins and Margo Martindale.“Justified: City Primeval” moves the action from Kentucky to Detroit, where Olyphant’s character, Raylan, joins a sharp-elbowed lawyer played by Aunjanue Ellis.Chuck Hodes/FXOlyphant (left, with Claire Danes and Dennis Quaid) plays a man who marries into the family of a celebrity chef in the Max series “Full Circle,” directed by Steven Soderbergh.Sarah Shatz/Max“With all due respect to our original cast, who I loved, adored and miss, it was really a fun experience being with all these new cast members but still feeling like we were doing our show,” Olyphant said. “This feels right in the sweet spot, but I don’t know, it could be a total failure.”If he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the possibility of tainting the legacy of his most famous creation, this is partly an effect of his affect. In conversation Olyphant is easygoing and quick-witted, qualities he brings to his work that also belie another of his defining traits: a simmering intensity.That combination proved perfect for the darkly comic, morally murky world of “Justified.” Olyphant’s performance in the series shifted his previously hit-and-miss career into a higher gear, which in turn has made his future prospects less dependent on the success of the “Justified” revival.As it happened, Olyphant was in New York for a screening of a different twisty crime thriller: “Full Circle,” in which he plays a Manhattanite with secrets who has married into the wealthy family of a celebrity chef, played by Dennis Quaid. (Other stars include Claire Danes, Jharrel Jerome and CCH Pounder.) Premiering Thursday on Max, the gripping six-episode serial revolves around a botched kidnapping with international repercussions.“Full Circle” was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the latest on a list of talented people with whom Olyphant long wanted to work and now has. Others include Quentin Tarantino, who cast Olyphant as the 1960s TV cowboy James Stacy in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019), and David O. Russell, who hired him to play a disfigured thug in “Amsterdam” (2022). Kenneth Lonergan made him the center of his acclaimed play “Hold On to Me Darling” (2016).“You can throw Larry David on the list,” Olyphant said, referring to his appearance as a smarmy groom in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2020. “I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this, but I’ll show up every day for that guy.”There was also a brief run as a “Star Wars” lawman in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett,” and a longer one as a Mormon U.S. Marshal in “Fargo.” He played a zombie’s husband in the horror comedy “Santa Clarita Diet” and himself in two different sitcoms: “The Good Place” and “The Grinder.” Earlier this year he had a memorable turn as a grizzled tour manager with terrible hair in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Soderbergh, who said he had wanted for years to cast Olyphant, called him “the best example of an experienced professional, in that he can give you anything that you want.”“That is the best thing I can say about somebody,” he added.The afternoon after the “Full Circle” screening, Olyphant reclined in a metal chair outside a TriBeCa cafe and marveled at the company he is keeping these days.“I had a blast working with the writers,” Olyphant said of the “Justified” revival. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Being with Steven Soderbergh last night watching something that he’s made that I’m a part of, it just means the world,” he said. “I don’t know why it took me so long to get there, but it’s really nice to be there now.”Now 55, Olyphant retains an athlete’s physique — he had just come from swimming at Asphalt Green in Battery Park — but his hair has gone mostly gray. As he has revived old roles, he has entered a new phase of his life: His three children with Alexis Knief, his wife of over 30 years, are now grown, and one has followed her father not just into show business but also into the world of “Justified.” Vivian Olyphant plays Raylan’s daughter, Willa, in the revival. “Nepotism, you can’t beat it,” he cracked.Olyphant wasn’t sure he wanted to reprise his “Deadwood” role as Sheriff Seth Bullock. (Bullock got a promotion for the movie, adding yet another marshal to Olyphant’s résumé.) Once on set, however, he realized how much the show meant to him. It also gave him a final opportunity to work with David Milch, one of television’s greatest writers, whom Olyphant deeply admires. (Milch has since entered an assisted-living facility for Alzheimer’s care.)“I don’t know what I was so afraid of,” he said. “It was quite moving for everybody involved.”But Olyphant always figured he would play Raylan again. “It seemed like the kind of character that could age well,” he said.The new series updates Leonard’s 1980 novel “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” one of his most beloved books. As Raylan joins the Detroit police in a case that encompasses a string of murders, a psychopathic aspiring singer, Albanian gangsters, corrupt cops and a crooked judge, he is frequently the odd man out in his own show.“I think they wanted that collision, which is why they sent him to one of the Blackest cities in the country,” said Ellis, who plays a defense attorney at the heart of the story. Other stars include Victor Williams, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Marin Ireland.During the original run of “Justified,” Olyphant was known as an occasionally demanding Leonard purist, insisting that the show stay true to the author’s dry wit and sneaky emotional complexity. That hasn’t changed — Ellis said Olyphant carried around a tattered copy of “City Primeval” on set “like it was the Bible” — though Olyphant suggested that the terms of engagement had evolved.“I had a blast working with the writers,” he said. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things. They were all used to my [expletive].” (Dinner, who also directed multiple episodes, said that “he was a great collaborator.”)“The game has gotten simpler,” Olyphant said of his acting career. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAll productions have highs and lows, but this show’s were more extreme than most. In the plus column, Olyphant called working with his daughter, who studies acting at the New School in New York, “one of the greatest experiences of my adult life.”“So special and challenging, walking that line between trying to get a scene and trying to be a parent,” he said. (“He definitely did give a lot of notes,” Vivian, 20, said. “But in between takes, we would have a lot of fun.”)Less great: the night when the show, shot mostly in Chicago, was filming in a park and the cast and crew found themselves in the middle of an actual shootout. They all dove for cover as two cars tore down the street toward and past them, trading sprays of automatic gunfire.“You could hear the bullets kicking off the back bumper of the front car: tink, tink, tink,” Olyphant recalled. No one in the production was injured, but everyone was left shaken.“My heart goes out to the people that live in those neighborhoods because that is just not any way to live,” he said.So does Raylan age well? Is there growth? Viewers will have to draw their own conclusions.“The road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind,” Dinner said. “We get him into a place by the end of the story where he makes some decisions about his life.”Olyphant’s road is getting shorter, too, but the trade-off is that “the game has gotten simpler,” he said. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.” His co-stars say that whatever his penchant for downplaying the job, his enthusiasm for it is apparent.“He’s obviously very experienced now,” Danes said. “But there’s still that sense of giddiness and searching, which is wonderful.”Olyphant in turn takes inspiration from those with even more experience, from their example that growth can be its own reward. Co-stars like Quaid, he said, “seem to be having even more fun than I’m having.”“So if they’ll have me and keep inviting me to the dance,” he said, “I think I’ll keep showing up.” More

  • in

    What’s on TV This Week: ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ and ‘Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge’

    The series about Staten Island vampires is back for a fifth season on FX and HGTV premieres a “Barbie” themed show.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayUNBREAKABLE (2000) 8:10 P.M. on HBO. Starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, this M. Night Shyamalan film follows a security guard, David Dunn (Willis), who is the sole survivor of a train wreck and doesn’t seem to have sustained any injuries. On his journey to figure out what happened he runs into Elijah Price (Jackson), who tells him about how some people are “unbreakable.” “Mr. Shyamalan shows that ‘The Sixth Sense’ was no accident,” the critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Deadpan melancholy has quickly become his signature.”TuesdayA still from “Iconic America.”Courtesy of Show of ForceICONIC AMERICA 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This episode, part of an eight-part documentary series hosted by David Rubenstein, explores the symbolism behind the Statue of Liberty and how it relates to the current values of the United States, with the help of historians and experts. Other episodes in the series include Fenway Park, the Golden Gate Bridge and American cowboys.Wednesday2023 ESPYS 8 p.m. on ABC. This annual ceremony, which celebrates individual and team achievements in sports, is being co-hosted by LeBron James and Jimmy Kimmel and broadcast live from the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles this year. Awards include best athlete for both men’s and women’s sports, best team and best play. The United States women’s national soccer team are set to receive the Arthur Ashe Award for their fight for equal pay.ThursdayTHE BLACKLIST 9 p.m. on NBC. This series, following ex-government agent Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader), is wrapping up its 10-season run this week. As Red’s journey comes to an end, there are two big loose ends to tie up. The first is to figure out what is going to happen to the ongoing task force. The second is, What is going to happen to Raymond Reddington? With the end of the series, the show will have to answer the question: Will he live or will he die?WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS 10 p.m. on FX. This mockumentary, about four vampires who live together on Staten Island, is back for a fifth season. In the first episode of the season Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Laszlo (Matt Berry) discover the joys of a mall. Also this season, they help throw a pride parade and Colin (the energy vampire, played by Mark Proksch) runs for office.FridayFrom left: Linda Cardellini and Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde.”MGMLEGALLY BLONDE (2001) 7:30 p.m. on Bravo. This movie taught us that having knowledge of how hair treatments work could win you a legal battle — and more important, that “girlie” doesn’t mean incapable. Reese Witherspoon plays Elle Woods, a sorority girl who makes it her mission to get into Harvard Law School to prove to her ex-boyfriend that she is marriage material. Along the way she finds a real passion and ability for practicing law. Jennifer Coolidge, as Elle’s manicurist-bff Paulette Bonafonté, and Luke Wilson, as her love interest and colleague Emmett, round out the cast of this fun movie that still packs an emotional punch.FINAL DESTINATION MARATHON various times on POP. Beginning at 8 p.m. you can cozy up, pop some popcorn, and brew some coffee since you could be up until 6 a.m. watching all five “Final Destination” movies. The general plot of every movie in the franchise is that some people narrowly escape death, except they didn’t escape death, it was a premonition for a future death. To jog your memory of some of the horrific deaths in store: There was the swimming pool incident in the first movie, the tanning bed incident in the third movie, and the botched eye surgery in the fifth movie.SaturdayALMOST FAMOUS (1990) 8 p.m. on TCM. This coming-of-age film is a semi-biographical story inspired by the director Cameron Crowe’s own story. Set in 1973, a 15-year-old William (Patrick Fugit) gets an assignment to write a profile on an up-and-coming band for Rolling Stone magazine. Crowe himself wrote for Rolling Stone in the 1970s. In the film version, William ends up following the band, Stillwater, on tour. Kate Hudson and Billy Crudup round out the cast, as a groupie and the lead singer of the band, respectively. Crowe “has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see,” the film critic A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times.SundayBarbie in a 2012 version of her dreamhouse.Bethany Clarke/Getty ImagesBARBIE DREAMHOUSE CHALLENGE 8 p.m. on HGTV. If you haven’t noticed, pretty much everything is “Barbie” themed these days (she’s been collaborating with Coldstone Creamery, Xbox, Gap and many, many more), and houses are apparently no exception. Hosted by the model Ashley Graham, this four-part series will have eight teams of HGTV personalities, and one Food Network chef, work to turn a house in Southern California into their best recreation of the Barbie Dreamhouse.MS. MATCH (2023) 9 p.m. on E! Since the 2010s ended, the airwaves have been seriously lacking new romantic comedies. This week, E! is doing us a favor by releasing their new original movie. It follows Athena, who works as a dating coach at a company that teaches people how to better date — but with all that fake dating, what she really misses is a genuine connection. When her college ex-boyfriend comes back into the picture, Athena has to try to address what she actually wants and how to prioritize herself.REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW YORK CITY 9 p.m. on Bravo. Even though we love our OG RHONY stars, there’s a new cast in town. The revamp of this classic Bravo show features housewives Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Dana Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Jessel Taank, and Brynn Whitfield. Andy Cohen, the producer of the Real Housewives franchise, teased on his show “Watch What Happens Live” that “it’s going to be a different show” than the first iteration. “It’s so hard because everyone is going to compare it to RHONY, which was so perfect. And I hope this is perfect in a totally different way,” Cohen added. More